Design an intelligent machine center - strategy and practice

This paper presents an agent-oriented methodology for representation, acquisition, processing of manufacturing knowledge and analysis, modeling of Intelligent Manufacturing System (IMS). Intelligent Manufacturing System adopts heterarchical and collaborative control as its information system architecture. The behavior of the entire manufacturing system is collaboratively determined by many interacting subsystems that may have their own independent interests, values, and modes of operation. The subsystems are represented as agents. An agent's architecture and task decomposition method are presented. The agent-oriented methodology is used to analyze and model as an intelligent machine cell. An intelligent machine center is considered as an autonomous module, a reconfigurable and fault tolerant machine tool with self-perception, decision making and self-process planning ability with cooperation to other machines through communication. As a simple prototype, a CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) based distributed software control system was developed. Finally, a case study of an intelligent machine center detailing a self-perception open controller is presented. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved